It's in the buildings and it's in the streets, between the cracks in the pavement

Antenna

Friday, 24 June 2011

HAIL MARY

Dear Mary Dejevsky

I write to take issue with your article of 24 June: Obama is right. Britain, too, must seize the chance to leave Afghanistan.

You claim: “It is not only military victory that remains elusive, but many of the higher purposes that have studded this near decade-long campaign – women's rights among them. Obama, to his credit, had progressively returned to the mission's original justification – rooting out the al-Qa'ida bases held to harbour the instigators of 9/11.”

It is quite frankly a myth to suggest that such higher purposes as protecting women’s rights - or even capturing Bin Laden - was ever the major intention of the US in pummelling the world’s poorest country into the dust. There are far more plausible reasons for the terrifying obliteration of Afghanistan, not least its role as a giant act of retaliation in order to demonstrate US power, the purpose of the war against al-Q'aida in Afghanistan being to remove the threat the organisation posed to the ‘stability’ of the Saudi regime and to ensure that oil remained in the correct hands.

Please don’t let yourself be fooled by blatant US propaganda and try to get your facts right.